Valve expands upon their plans for hardware, with Gabe Newell telling Kotaku they hope to begin selling appliance-style PCs next year to provide a turnkey way to play Steam games in the living room using the service's new Big Picture Mode. He explains this will help to unify two oddly defined environments:

"I think in general that most customers and most developers are gonna find that [the PC is] a better environment for them," Newell told me. "Cause they won't have to split the world into thinking about 'why are my friends in the living room, why are my video sources in the living room different from everyone else?' So in a sense we hopefully are gonna unify those environments."

Newell said he's expecting a lot of different companies to release these types of packages—"We'll do it but we also think other people will as well," he told me—and that Valve's hardware might not be as open-source or as malleable as your average computer.

"Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he said. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that's what some people are really gonna want for their living room.

Sepharo wrote on Dec 9, 2012, 16:50:If it makes PC gaming easier for the masses I'm for it.

Though I would argue that PC gaming is already pretty damn easy these days.

Please no. I'd appreciate if the Brotards stuck to their console COD slop and left the PC gaming to intelligent people.

"Here we see the curious, solitary animal known as the "PC Elitist" in a web forum, its natural habitat! Look how he encircles his prey with insults and silly, baseless arrogance before he pounces! This is amazing!"

Too bad you can't type in an Australian accent - it would have given it a more authentic nature show feel.

I'm hardly a PC Elitist. I have my PS3 and I play many games on it. It was more of a jab at the fact that the majority of the console fanbase are now Brotards thanks to games like COD. There is a reason why specific genre's such as the Eastern RPG (FF, Dragon Quest, Star Ocean etc) have all but died out on the current generation of consoles when on the original Playstation when it was still "Not cool" to be a gamer they flourished. In fact the short attention span of the Brotard led to things like the streamlining of the more recent Final Fantasy's which pissed off a lot of it's original followers. Feel free to disagree with me if you'd like. But I am correct. PC Gaming feels like the last bastion against stupidity sometimes... and even that is stretching it.

Eastern JRPG's died off because of a lack of innovation. I blame Nintendo really, Japanese game makers seem to be stuck in the same rut they've been in for years. Remaking the same few games over and over and over while the west has moved on to other things.